We present here a bibliometric analysis of publications on photosynthesis research from 1992 to 2009 in the Science
Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded) Web of Science. This has allowed us to examine the growing trends and the
key topics on this subject. We have assessed the document type, language of the publications, publication output, subject
category, journal distribution, countries and territories of these publications, institutions involved, hot topics and highly
cited papers. The top 30 countries/territories were ranked according to their total number of articles (TA), single country
articles (SCA), internationally collaborative articles (ICA), first author articles (FAA) and corresponding author articles
(CAA). Research directions on the subject of photosynthesis were also investigated and evaluated by statistically
analyzing the distribution of author keywords in the database. Our analysis indicates that “water”, “stress”, “carbon
dioxide”, “nitrogen” and “climate change” are hot topics of research on photosynthesis during this period.
